View from the top

I took last Sunday off and walked up the neighbouring hill to take some photos.
The path disappeared a couple of hundred metres below the summit but I stuck to the plan. Soon I was stuck to the hill. I felt a bit of a prick: in fact many of them.
The Romans had introduced terracing to the stony hills and once upon a time the entire slope up to the 300m summit had been terraced. Each terrace was only about 2m wide and the retaining walls were no more than stacked stones. The dry-stone walling familiar to Northern climes was not deemed necessary. In recent times the land had been abandoned, the walls had collapsed, and prickly plants have sewn themselves into a cover for the rocks. No way of knowing whether ones footstep will land on hard ground or stomp through scratchy veg for another metre. The predicament is to decide whether to scrape your leg out of the hole and hope for better luck next time, or keep going and let the other leg take a turn at suffering an angry stab strike from the side.
But I made it and took these photos of the sea at Denia, the gateway to the Balearic Islands, and of the casita where I am staying.

On my return I discovered that my hosts had vanished leaving the gate locked so I could not leave. Unfortunately I needed by 4 o'clock to be at another Dutch couples place as they had invited me to dinner. Nothing to do but wait and at 5 my hosts arrived and kindly drove me down to the other house.
Rijn and Else are in their 70's and also live in a Dutch bubble here. She was an HR manager for the now defunct Wang and he was an ex-Burroughs man who had been in the computer business even longer than me, so between us we had a good winge about the decline of systems knowledge and the inability of accountants to understand the difference between commercial and Home computers. Then we watched Dutch TV for an hour because the final of Maestro was showing. This competition is between a number of wannabe conductors who are given the opportunity to conduct a professional orchestra in a variety of pieces. They were surprisingly good and it really demonstrated the difference the conductor makes to a piece of music. So there is a novelty, I found a game show I actually enjoyed.Lue lisää